Science Said We'd All Be Crushed To Death On Friday - It Was Peer-Reviewed

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle,

Sixty-six years ago, the journal Science published a peer-reviewed study confirming what many know today: a distressing share of the academic literature is nonsense prattle among the elite - even as scientists continue to fawn over "peer reviewed research" like holy scripture. Back in 1960, professors at the University of Illinois published a 4-page paper predicting the human population might grow so large that we would all perish in a global crowd crush on Nov. 13, 2026.

But as you read this, we're still here - a detail presumably too insignificant for peer review.

I'm not pulling your leg. Science actually published this. And just in case anyone questions the scientific rigor of this journal, the authors aggressively padded the paper with dozens of differential equations and slapped on 26 references at the end.

"Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death," the professors concluded. "They will be squeezed to death."

Stanford mathematician Marvin Shinbrot labeled the paper an "outstanding example of the inadmissible use of mathematics to prop up a manifestly absurd conclusion." Still, the Science stamp of approval proved stronger than common sense, and the paper went on to be cited hundreds of times by other researchers.

The incident brings to mind two other studies Science published that also drew conclusions defying basic math. In July 2022, the journal ran two peer-reviewed papers claiming the COVID pandemic began in December 2019 at a Wuhan food market - papers that provided convenient political cover for the authors' fellow virologists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where accumulating evidence suggests the virus actually originated.

But here's the problem with both studies: the virus was already infecting people weeks before the December market outbreak. And we know that from the virus's molecular clock.

A molecular clock uses the rate of genetic mutations in a virus to estimate when an outbreak began. By that measure, the COVID outbreak began in October - not November, and certainly not December.

"If you look at the molecular clock of the virus, it emerged in the middle of October, late October, not the middle or end of November," former University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric told congressional investigators under oath in January 2024.

"The only thing we have really solid data is that the market was the site of amplification in late December, January," Baric continued. "That's still two months from the origin date, based on a molecular clock, which means it was circulating somewhere before it got there. And the question is, where was it?"

Where was it? A fair question - but not a new one. Science has been propping up absurd conclusions since at least 1960, when it gave us until today to live. Peer review, it turns out, has never been much for stopping nonsense.